After driving down the road a while, he looked in his rear-view mirror.

A dark, two-tone pickup truck stopped beside the girl.

His sister never made it home.

Thirty-eight years later, the high-profile abduction/rape/murder of a member of the Burt automotive family has never been solved.

The next day highway workers found her nude body under a bridge in a shallow creek in Deer Creek Canyon in Jefferson County. It was found where it was dropped, 6 miles southwest of her home where she lived with her mother.

Two young boys made a gruesome discovery in the spillway of the Cherry Creek Reservoir 30 years ago today.

Vicki Carpenter, 24

But their find while fishing would have more meaning for one of them.

“We saw this thing floating around, and it looked pretty freaky,” Scott Buyer, then 14, told a reporter at the time. “It looked so realistic, just like a horror movie.”

Scott touched the arm to see if it was real and flesh came off.

The true significance of the discovery wouldn’t sink in until he learned the identity of the woman who was weighed down with two cinder blocks tied to a swing-set chain wrapped around her neck.

The partially clad, bloated body was that of Vicki Carpenter, a former neighbor and baby-sitter for Scott and his sister.

The boys found her April 2, 1985, two months after the 24-year-old model had been reported missing after failing to return home from a swimsuit-modeling show at Knick’s Restaurant and Saloon at 7800 E. Hampden Ave.

The 37-year-old woman was beautiful, vivacious, talented, popular, articulate – and she was addicted to cocaine.

Elvin was gifted at scrimshaw. She engraved tiny scenes on ivory, bone or sea shells and inlaid the miniature artwork in gold or silver pendants, rings or pins, said her friend and fellow scrimshaw artist Joan Bondy. Elvin was also a talented oil painter.

The two sold their work to many Denver jewelry stores.

In social gatherings with Denver’s wealthy, Elvin shined. She was often the center of attention, drawing people to her with her charm and wit, Bondy said.

In 1978, Bondy moved into Elvin’s home and paid rent. Elvin was a lot of fun. They would go together on skiing vacations in Aspen, where Elvin had many powerful and wealthy friends.

“She had a larger than life personality. Her house was a place where there were people in and out all the time,” Bondy said.

Jessica Moya would give her account of her personal parental nightmare dozens of times over the years: first to police, then to neighbors and family and then to reporters.

Her toddler son Anthony simply vanished in a matter of a few minutes from his grandmother’s apartment. One minute he was sleeping peacefully in a bedroom. Fifteen minutes later he was nowhere to be found.

Though it happened during a period of time when many people are normally scrambling to get to work or to run errands, no one at the Lakewood apartment complex near West Sixth Avenue and West Wadsworth Boulevard would report seeing the tyke wandering around unaccompanied by an adult.

The 18-year-old mother of two awoke around 8:30 a.m. that Monday morning, June 12, 1989. Jessica had been sleeping on the floor in the apartment’s living room.

She walked into a bedroom where her 23-month-old son Anthony had been put to bed the night before.

Anthony was still sleeping.

Jessica said she went back to sleep in the front room for another 15 minutes, woke and discovered the boy was gone.

The apartment door was open.

“I got scared,” Moya later said. “I looked all over – in the cupboards, in the closets and under the bed. I looked everywhere.”

Buttel didn’t show, however, and the mystery of where Keith Anderson’s body lies continues.

Keith was last seen on Feb. 5, 1984 in Grand County. In the years after the disappearance and suspected murder of their son, Bob and his wife, Jo Ann, hired a private investigator and a psychic to track the elusive Buttel.

“He just totally disappeared. Everything is a dead end for us,” Anderson said. “We don’t know if he changed his name or if he is dead. It’s been a weird thing.”

Anderson clearly remembers the day in February 1984 that he got a call from Vernon “Spud” Weaver, who said Keith boarded a horse in his barn and that Keith’s truck was left idling near the barn with his German shepherd in the back, but there was no sign of Keith.

Bob Anderson knew something was very wrong.

His other son called the Grand County Sheriff’s Office. Deputies opened an investigation, Bob Anderson said.

They found Keith’s blood on some horse manure in the barn.

A witness later told authorities she saw Buttel’s truck loaded with something wrapped in blankets driving near Anderson’s ranch.

A deputy interviewed Buttel, who had left his wife, two kids and a bankrupt farm in Illinois to come to Colorado with his young girlfriend.

That woman had left him shortly afterward and was living with Keith Anderson at the time of his disappearance.

Buttel told authorities he boarded two horses at Weaver’s barn and saw Keith in the barn that morning. He said Keith got a bloody nose in the stall and walked outside.

Buttel also told authorities he noticed that Keith’s horse had a wound, according to a Ski-Hi News article. The horse died two days later and when an necropsy was performed, authorities found a .44-caliber bullet, the article said.

The horse had been shot, likely when its owner was killed, Bob Anderson said.

People at a nearby church later reported hearing several gunshots that morning, according to the Ski Hi News article.

By his own account, Harold Arthur Henthorn endured a tragic spell of bad luck spanning two decades.

Two wives died in freak accidents while he alone was present to witness their bone-shattering deaths.

Yet, coincidentally in each case, he reaped riches in life insurance payouts following their untimely deaths.

Federal agents and Douglas County sheriff’s investigators have either obtained criminal charges or are investigating allegations against Henthorn that the deaths were not coincidental but intentional.

The first death of one of Henthorn’s wives happened late at night on May 6, 1995 on an obscure road west of Sedalia in the Rockies.

It was two weeks after she had undergone exploratory surgery.

After a dozen years of marriage, Harold and Sandra, known as “Lynn,” went on a drive in their Jeep into the Rockies on Colorado Highway 67.

The following account is based on numerous witnesses that are contained in hundreds of pages of federal and Douglas County reports.

Harold had been driving that night in 1995 and pulled to the side of the road to tend to a tire.

He roots through the back of his Jeep until he finds his car jack. He realizes that it is damaged. But luckily he had two boat jacks in the vehicle. He decided to use those to prop up his Jeep and change his tire, which was low, but not flat.

Lynn held a flashlight and the lug nuts while Henthorn changed the tire. He warned Toni not to touch the Jeep and to stay at least six feet away from the Jeep while he was changing the tire.

Seventeen-year-old Christine Michele Jones, who had graduated from a high school in Anchorage, Alaska, lived in an upscale home in Boulder Heights northwest of the University of Colorado campus in Boulder. While preparing to attend college that fall, she worked as a sales clerk at Montgomery Ward.

Christine decided it was a good day to wash her Toyota in a canyon stream in Left Hand Canyon.

She dressed in a blue T-shirt, faded blue jeans and sandals that Thursday morning.

Christine told her father, Dennis Jones, and stepmother, Catherine, she was going to go clean her car at the stream. It was about 9:30 a.m. when she left the home at 220 Deer Trail Road.

She loaded a bucket and soap and cleaning supplies into her light blue car and drove northeast on Deer Trail Road a few blocks to Lee Hill Drive.

Christine turned left onto Lee and drove a little more than a mile until she reached Left Hand Canyon Drive.

A bridge at the intersection crosses over a stream in a canyon between Nugget and Hill mountains. It’s there that she began washing her car.

A few hours later, her parents realized Christine had not returned home from washing her car.

They were immediately concerned and drove down to the stream to look for her. Christina’s stepbrother also went to help search.

Bruce Bennett was covered with blood as he climbed the stairs to defend his wife, Debra, and their two daughters.

But his earnest attempts to save his family were overcome by the ruthlessness of his attacker early on the morning of Jan. 16, 1984, 31 years ago today.

The cat burglar who entered home at 16387 E. Center Drive in Aurora armed with a knife and hammer had more on his mind than theft.

Before Bennett’s mother, Constance Bennett, discovered his body hours later inside his home, he had been cut and slashed numerous times and struck in the head with a hammer.

He had numerous injuries that could have killed him.

“It was quite clear he fought with the intruder,” said Ann Tomsic, deputy district attorney for the Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office. “It’s apparent he had struggled with his attacker in more than one location and on more than one floor of the house.”

The 27-year-old man lost the battle with a killer who pummeled and sexually assaulted his 26-year-old wife, Debra, and 7-year-old daughter, Melissa.

The killer also shattered the face of Bruce Bennett’s 3-year-old daughter, Vanessa.

Though Vanessa’s jaw was crushed, sending jagged bones into her windpipe, she survived after her grandmother, Constance Bennett, checked on the family later that morning when they didn’t show up to work at a family-owned furniture store.

“It’s just like it was yesterday,” Constance Bennett said. “It’s something I’ll never get over. It’s scary what people can do.”

Vanessa went to live with Bennett after a lengthy series of operations that left scars on her arms, face and head.

An investigation in which more than 500 people were questioned did not uncover any leads to solve the case.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.